


OTGW- Tenebris, Innominatam, Aequilibrium

by msflyk



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: But there is one sexy...ish? scene, Edelwood Trees, Enoch appears only in the last chapter, F/M, I just wanted to write about a couple and nothing else, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Leshen - Freeform, Lesovikha, Murder, Murderer, No Smut, OOC, The Unknown (Over the Garden Wall), The beast - Freeform, Translation, italian to english translation, leshy, sensitive topics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-04
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 15,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27874334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/msflyk/pseuds/msflyk
Summary: Beast X female OC story." "Woodsman" was at least a qualification, a piece of that person's identity, a clue when it came to understand who the person in front of him was.On the contrary, while introducing herself she had not said who she was, she had said who and what she wasn't, nor had she said something he didn't already know."
Relationships: The Beast/OC
Kudos: 2





	1. Innominatam

**Author's Note:**

  * A translation of [OTGW- Tenebris, innominatam, aequilibrium](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/721478) by -Cthylla- (...myself). 



> Beta/help in translation: @itachiuchihaforever (this woman is so 💎precious💎. If you like horror villains, check her profile on Wattpad!)

Tiredness.

It was the first thing Beast felt when he regained consciousness next to the strong roots of a tree in his forest, and it was what he felt even now.

He hooked the lantern to the branch of a withered tree, inclined and soon destined to fall, then leaned against it and closed his eyes thinking, with a certain bitterness, that his condition was deadly similar to that of the plant.

The defeat that had occurred some time before by the two young brothers, the Woodsman and himself - though Beast was proud, was not fool enough to deny it - had had a terrible impact on his physique and energy. Looking at the Lantern was revealing: during his stay in the Unknown, he had never seen the light become so dim.   
That the light did not shine as brightly as it did in the long period in which he had tricked the Woodsman into taking care of the Lantern could perhaps be considered normal, the machinery built by that man allowed to extract more oil from the Edelwoods, but he doubted that it really had anything to do with it. 

The Beast didn't even know how he had managed to survive. He only remembered how stubborn and desperate the Woodsman's expression was when he blew, remembered his own animalistic scream, the pain, the cold, a blinding light and finally his awakening: nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps the wick had not completely extinguished and this, together with the residual oil, had miraculously rekindled the flame. He wasn't sure about what happened but that theory didn't sound completely stupid to him.

"Just as the theory that Elsewhere people are living an _interesting_ moment," he thought.

In addition to his exhaustion, in fact, he had also noticed another thing: the number of lost souls in the Unknown had grown.   
At another time he would have considered that a wonderful thing, as he did when something like that happened in the past, but at that time it was more like a burden, something very difficult to handle alone.   
There were many people to follow and to deceive, people to lead in the path of depression, loss of hope and will; compared to the way he was feeling lately, there were too many. His fortune lay in the fact that lost souls often found their final death by themselves, with the consequent birth of new Edelwoods.

After a brief sigh, he convinced himself to move his lazy limbs again - even more lazy than they had been before, which he had never thought to be possible until then. He considered himself very lazy by nature - to go collect oil or to look for some wayfarers to transform into fuel, but when he reopened his eyes he was assailed by a feeling of panic very similar to that experienced just before the Woodsman's blow.

"Where is my Lantern?!"

He could not believe that it had really happened, he had rested for a short time -or so he thought- the Lantern was close to him, so how could It have disappeared?!

He stood up and looked around in a frantic search for a clue until he noticed footprints in the snow and something distant that could easily have been the dim glow of his Lantern. 

Given this, he decided to get closer and try to get it without wasting any more time. His physical condition was suggesting him to try to make the person who had stolen the Lantern his new Lantern Bearer, to make the Woodsman's house in the forest inhabited again and to make the machinery the man had built after the mill's destruction work again, but after what had happened some time ago he was not too sure it was a good idea: he had always been good in pushing the Woodsman's buttons so that his own soul would be safe - ...almost - but with that thief there was nothing, nothing at all, to give him the certainty.

The first thing he noticed when he came close enough was that the thief was covered by a hooded cloak, the second thing was the flash of light on the blade of an axe, and the third was that the weapon was held by a white hand, too delicate to belong to someone used to hold such tools, or to a man. 

Reassured -but not too much, because that axe looked sharp and he could boast neither great physical strength nor superhuman agility- he decided to reveal himself in front of the thief, a few meters away of course. Now he could also see her face, perhaps not very well, but enough to conclude that she was not just "pale", she was very pale. In his opinion that was a sign of an evident demonic possession. Such things were not uncommon in the Unknown.

"I believe you have something that belongs to me," he said "The Lantern that you're holding so casually. Giving it back to me may be for the better: although magical, it cannot help you get rid of your demon" he continued "but considering the nature and consequences of certain possessions, maybe we could reach an agreement".

Possessed people had a tendency to devour others and, if she had left at least one little bone, the corpses of devoured people inside his forest would have spawned other Edelwoods. 

The thief sighed. "Here we go again…"

"Here we go again with… what?" he asked, vaguely perplexed by her reaction -or perhaps it was more correct to say "by the complete absence of any".

"I've already explained this to the old lady with black teeth who lives with her niece relatively close by, or far away, on the right… or on the left… well, somewhere…" the girl -or woman, Beast couldn't be sure about how old she was- shrugged "It's a weird place, this one. I realized it soon, I suppose due the animal musicians that I saw… hm, what was I saying? Ah, yes: I am not possessed by a demon, I am just naturally pale. Don't be alarmed".

Like the surface of a lake in windless days, there was only one way to define that person and her manner of speaking: flat. Unemotional, at least for the moment. Moreover, the lack of cough seemed to confirm her words about being naturally pale. Beast's perplexity went from being vague to being full.

"I am not alarmed… nor am I the one who should be" he pointed out to her, deciding to come a little closer.

"Of course you're not, after all we're in your forest".

The further it went, the more that conversation sounded strange; and thought by someone who lived in the Unknown, it was saying a lot. "So you knew very well who the Lantern belonged, and belongs to, when you took it".

"It wasn't that obvious, it could have belonged to someone even more lost than I am".

A lost soul: although her attitude was bizarre, was no more nor less than that, just like anyone who happened to be in that forest before. "It's easy to lose your way home, finding it again is not. Sometimes is easier to give up, give in to tiredness, and fall asleep in the snow," he said in a warm and bewitching voice.

"Or maybe falling asleep against a tree" she responded.

It was a peculiarity of Beast's ability to exert a little influence on small animals, small magical creatures and in some cases even human beings -without the help of his little turtles of oil-: It was the extra magic "quid" that, along with psychological manipulation, had lead the Woodsman to close himself to the world and listen only to his voice for many years, but that was not the case. Feeling so exposed in his weakness, Beast felt a certain irritation. Not enough to induce him to challenge the axe blade, however: never enough.

"Listen to me" continued the thief, lost soul and bizarre person, lowering the hood "You seem to be rather tired and so am I. I need shelter. Do you want to make a deal? You show me a place to stay for tonight and I will owe you a favor".

From perplexity and irritation, Beast passed into amazement. It was the first time ever that a person wandering in the Unknown proposed to him a deal of their own free will, and that one was also a kind of deal open to anything. 

He wondered if that person knew what she was doing, if she really realized what it meant to propose similar agreements or if she was just very naive even if she didn't seem so, since she already knew who he was. There were also some odd details he couldn't figure out at that moment, but there was the house where the Woodsman had lived, it could be a good opportunity to start the oil machine again, and she was lost, and he was tired.

Why not try it?

"Maybe I can agree, I can say yes," he said, "but not to someone whose I don't know anything about, not even their name".

The girl, woman or whatever her age was, indefinibile looking at her features, displayed a thoughtful face. "I noticed that people in this place have a tendency to present themselves in a quite artistic way, I guess I have to adopt those social costumes. "Tall nor short is the one who's lost, thin nor fat: has curves, at most. Where's her home? Don't know the way. What is 'home'? She just can't say. As long as she's lost in this place full of madness, if you call her by name, let her be 'Nameless'!" she concluded, with a brief bow of her head.

"Nameless," he repeated.

Beast was undecided whether to simply ignore such strangeness or feeling mocked. Clearly that couldn't be her birth name, but choosing such a name - or better, to deprive herself of it - was even more absurd than anything else. 

For him, Nameless was also as irrelevant as the Woodsman was, but "Woodsman" was at least a qualification, a piece of that person's identity, a clue when it came to understand who the person in front of him was. 

On the contrary, while introducing herself she had not said who she was, she had said who and what she wasn't, nor had she said something he didn't already know.

"And after presenting myself in rhyme to someone who, if he could, would have gladly turned me into a tree of oil, I'd say that I can consider myself fully integrated into the Unknown. Do we have a deal? ...or not?"

There was time, there would have been; and in any case, for once in his life, if it would have been the case he could have decided to lower himself to the level of getting his hands dirty and take care of Nameless after seeing her give in to sleep. She was only a human being after all.

"Follow me," he said to the girl, woman or whatever "I'll take you to the shelter you asked me about… and I'll tell you how you can return the favor".


	2. Effectus

According to their deal, he had brought Nameless to the former Woodsman's mill. Along the way they had discussed how she would repay the favor, and she had agreed to the terms of their deal. The only little problem was the fact that she had never chopped wood in her life, as she said showing him - once inside the house and lit the chimney - the absent muscles of a pale arm that wasn't flaccid nor wiry, but certainly incapable of chopping whole logs. 

It was no big deal for Beast, the kind of magic that he possessed allowed him to break a tree into more manageable pieces. Then, overcoming the laziness in which he had always laid down even in this, so he had done. Nameless would have had to load the pieces on a wheelbarrow and cut them even smaller to get them into the Woodsman's machinery if needed, but the bulk of the work was spared to her, and he was spared by doing the always hateful manual labor.

A new routine had been created for the Beast: try to make the lost souls even more lost, rest, check the Edelwood trees' state, rest again, check the birth of new trees and eventually help them with magic, rest more, go to the mill to check his Lantern and, last but not least, talk to Nameless, which was exactly what he was going to do at that moment.

She was the only "stable" company source in the forest, as the Woodsman had been some time ago. Beast often had that man in his thoughts as the only possible term for comparison with the current state of things, yet he was forced to admit that his comparing attempts only helped to a certain extent in understanding the whole situation.

If Nameless had been there for a short time or a long time he could not say by now: as the girl, woman or whatever she was had often observed, the concept of time and space was peculiar in the Unknown, but the thing with Nameless was that he hadn't been able to get anything from her except oil. The reasons why she was there, what was dear to her and what wasn't, what lead her to propose and make a deal with him remained a mystery. No information, zero, Nameless was and nameless remained.

The need for a shelter was not enough to justify all this, because she could have stopped elsewhere in her wanderings, she met a lot of the Unknown inhabitants before him. Well, Beast knew this at least, but it was always part of what Nameless had allowed him to know from the beginning.

"Allowed", a word that sounded so annoying to Beast in describing the behavior of that vagabond towards Him. 

Or maybe, he then reflected, it really had something to do with the shelter and the possibility that Nameless, that evening, was more desperate than she had given the impression of being in proposing that agreement.

Agreement from which she wasn't now trying to break free imagining the possible consequences. Nameless could have thought that even if she had tried to escape him, and had succeeded in doing so for some time, her wandering would have taken her back to the forest one day or another, and then...

Yes, that could have been logical enough.

He knocked on the door, not because he really respected the space that he had allowed Nameless to have, but out of respect for the rules of etiquette that he had imposed upon himself. He could have been more or less responsible for the death and the transformation into trees of many lost souls, but they could never have called him rude.

"Come in".

When the door was opened, his nostrils hidden by the darkness from which he was always covered were invaded by the wonderful scent of what could not be anything else but freshly made tea. Beast had the confirmation when he looked in the direction of the wooden table placed next to one of the windows and saw the thief, wanderer and Lantern Bearer -with her hair neither light nor dark gathered in a low ponytail- preparing to pour that nectar of the gods in two cups already prepared.

"Wait a minute, I have mine" Beast blocked her, pulling out from underneath his only apparently worn out dress a delicate white tea cup.

His action caused a certain hilarity in the young woman who, in her being always calm and flat as the surface of the famous lake, raised an eyebrow and even gave him a brief laugh.

"A tea cup? Then you already knew what you would find..."

"No," replied Beast in a neutral voice trying to hide a slight irritation "I have it because...".

A good question… or better, a very bad one, because he did not have a rational answer to give. The most he could have told her was that the Cup was a lucky charm -even if it was a very strange charm. 

On second thought, he couldn't even remember where he got it originally or when, he just had it with him. He had even used it when he tried to turno into an Edelwood tree the younger of the two brothers who had contributed to his defeat long before, aka Gregory.

"Because I have personal and extremely important reasons," he concluded, "Nothing that concerns you, in any case".

"Even if it was a fixation there is nothing to be ashamed of, everyone has his own," said Nameless, removing the cup she had prepared and replacing it with Beast's, which she, then, kindly filled first. "I, for example, hated it when I found the furniture put in different positions than usual, and at the table, as on the sofa, I always sat in the same place".

"I guess finding the furniture moved is one of the drawbacks that can happen when you don't live alone," he said, finally feeling satisfied for that bit of information he had obtained.

It seemed that Nameless had not always lived alone, so maybe besides being in the Unknown for some time she had not arrived there in total solitude, and the vagabond may have had a stability before becoming one for… well, some reason. Maybe she had ventured out looking for a specific missing person? That could have been once again an analogy with the Woodsman, but those were nothing but mere hypotheses.

"But one misses those little annoying things when people with whom one shared everyday life are no longer there," continued Beast. "Isn't it?"

After briefly sipping the tea, Nameless shook her head. "If I were to say that I have regrets I'd be lying, so no, it is not necessarily true".

One step forward and two steps back, it was like dancing a dance without knowing how to, and no matter how long they met each other every day - for how many days? He couldn't tell - no matter how long he could prolong his stay in the house of five minutes more each time, the answers still didn't come.

He looked at the Lantern in the center of the table, next to the teapot, and perhaps it was the sight of the two things together that brought to light something that should have jumped out at him since the beginning.

"Nameless".

"Yes?"

"This," said Beast, lifting the cup, "is tea".

"The last time I checked it was, and it is also of good quality".

"I had noticed the quality," Beast insisted, "These are fine tea leaves, otherwise the smell would have been quite different and the taste would have been different too. So my question is: where does it come from?"

"Wait, you really don't know? You came here prepared, when you answered me like that about your cup I thought you were making fun of me".

"You thought I was making fun of you? Are you serious?" he wondered, without giving voice to his thoughts.

"The chariot... at the swamp, the one with quicksand," said Nameless with a nod of a hand, "the one where I loaded the wood from the Edelwood tree that we are grinding now and where I almost ended up swallowed with the Dark Lantern and everything, you know".

The Beast eyerolled remembering the rescue of the Lantern -and secondly of its present Bearer- along with the alien feeling of the soft flesh under his gnarled fingers when he had been forced to grasp by the hips that human being... who, besides being Nameless, had also been careless. "I understand. Don't remind me of that. A chariot, you said?"

Nameless nodded. "A chariot driven by two people, carrying a new type of tea and many, many chocolates from who- knows- where. For Mr. Quincy Endicott, they said... I believe that the gentleman in question, in addition to being rich, has also found love, the chocolates are all in heart-shaped boxes, but that's not the point. You have no idea of the scent that came from the back of that chariot".

Beast was getting a good look at the young woman's delightful air when she talked about it, but he saw something else behind her smile, something else behind that eyes, neither dark nor light - never understanding what she was, only what she wasn't, as always- something else behind everything.

He decided to let her continue.

"They had gotten lost and stopped here to ask for directions. I don't know where Endicott lives, so I tried to direct them to the tavern just outside the forest...".

"...which is on the opposite side of the swamp, Nameless".

"That's right. Do you understand?" she said.

Flat calm had been restored to her face, but not entirely, not at that moment, not while she was talking about what she had committed. Intentionally or not? Beast was still not sure.

But if so...

"It's a pity that I hadn't thought about it there and then. I was mistaken. Huff, geez..." continued Nameless, "At that point, recognizing it, I decided to do the right thing I could do: I took the wheelbarrow and went to try to save them".

"At the risk of ending up inside again, maybe together with my Lantern, if you had brought it with you" commented Beast with a low voice and full of disapproval for the treatment she reserved to something that, after all, contained his own soul "to save wayfarers, no less, despite our agreement and knowing what I do".

"Wayfarers? What was I supposed to do with wayfarers, roast them? It seems to me that we already do so, in a certain sense," replied Nameless, referring to the origins of the oil burning in the Lantern. "It was the tea and chocolates that I wanted to save! Do you know what's the only kind of dessert I've seen since I arrived here? Potatoes and molasses, Beast. That's what they tried to make me eat: Potatoes. And. Molasses" she repeated, "Eat that junk yourselves, for God's sake".

This time Beast was undecided, again because of Nameless, but not about her. It was about himself and his being more incredulous about what he had heard, or about laughing out loud on it.

"You went to save the load, not the people," he thought.

Two pieces went into place in his mind with an imaginary "plop", realizing another thing that had been in front of his eyes from the very beginning: Nameless didn't care at all about the other lost souls, it was like that even before their deal.

When she had stolen the Lantern from him she said "It could have been someone even more lost than I am", proving that if she had a conscience, the possibility of someone getting lost because of her wouldn't have weighed on it. Nameless had seen him sleeping against the tree, she had let it slip more or less voluntarily that very day; Beast could consider as a lie what she had told him before, but what she had implied was the absolute truth.

That's why she had proposed a deal, that's why she had accepted its terms, that's why she didn't try to cancel their agreement and go away: it wasn't for fear of the consequences as he had believed, it was because everything was perfectly fine for her.

"Oh, you're laughing, Beast, but I had been thinking for a long time that I would have killed for some chocolate".

"I would have killed", she said. He couldn't say whether the woman's was irony or a lack of awareness of her responsibility, but what was certain was that he didn't want to let it go.

"I think I have to correct you, Nameless: you actually killed for chocolate and good tea" he said, happy to have something uncomfortable, maybe, for once, to throw in her face, "And you know what? Except for the oil, this is one of the best reasons I've ever heard. If chocolate is just as tasty, of course".

Nameless remained silent for a few moments, apparently meditating on his words as she looked at the tea leaves at the bottom of the now empty cup. "Do you think I can really consider myself one hundred percent responsible?"

"No doubt, but even if so, what does it matter to you? In fact, who do you care about? Surely not them, or am I wrong?" he urged.

"You're not mistaken. I don't care about them at all, and perhaps..." the Lantern Bearer shrugged, then sighed, "It's since I've ended up in this weird place that I've been doing… let's say some math. Or rather, I've been trying to, but I haven't yet reached a conclusion. I was used to a certain reality, everything here is different, whatever "here" is. How much does a murder weight here? What are the consequences in following such suggestions dictated by selfishness and desires of the moment? I still try to understand causes and effects, especially effects".

Effects?

If that's what Nameless wanted, he was pretty sure he could give her some enlightenment.

"Get the lantern, Nameless. Knowing things and seeing them live is different, and if what you want is an educational outing on 'effects', an educational outing is what you will get".

He watched her take the Dark Lantern and get ready to follow him without even wearing a cape and without even saying "Okay", without asking him any questions, maybe even without asking questions to herself; of that last thing, however, he could not have confirmation, but it did not matter much to him, because for once he felt he could "transmit" something in response to a relevant uncertainty of someone who, until then, had not offered him handholds in that sense.

He walked beside her along the road that would lead them to the swamp, ready to avoid her to fall down and drop the Lantern if she tripped. His intervention was only necessary on one occasion, a definitive sign of improvement over the usual -that woman's tendency to trip was almost ridiculous sometimes- and it didn't take them long to reach their destination.

The chariot was only half sunk but, of the men who had driven it, only the hands of one remained visible -clawing the sky with the desperation of one who knew his horrible destiny- and part of the face of another, with his mouth half wide open to swallow what had killed him and his glassy, dead gaze. On both corpses there was a glimpse of Edelwood tendrils.

"They were still alive when I went back to get the third part of the load" was the comment of Nameless, dead calm as always.

"The third part".

She had given them the wrong directions, had come and gone twice to loot the chariot and, after all this, had dared to ask him if she was "one hundred percent responsible".

If through experience he had felt just a little less sure that the uncertainty of Nameless was true, he would have thought she was mocking him… again.

He decided to ignore her and show her what they had gone there for.  
  


" _Come, wayward souls_

_And wander through the darkness,_

_There is a light for the lost and the meek..._ "  
  


As he continued his singing the tendrils of the Edelwoods started moving, fortifying themselves, growing inside and outside of what were, indeed, Nameless' first victims, breaking with a sound snap the jaw of the corpse which face was still visible.  
  


" _Sorrow and fear are easily forgotten_

 _When you submit to the soil of the earth!..._ "  
  


As soon as he finished the last note, the two new Edelwoods began to grow even faster, dripping mud and dirty water as the voices of those who had become trees - cut or not - and whose souls resided restlessly in the forest joined in a chorus to continue his song.  
  


" _Grow, tiny seed_

_You are called to the trees,_

_Rise till your leaves fill the sky_

_Until your sighs_

_Fill the air in the night..._ "  
  


"The effect of your tea and chocolate, Nameless. Don't you, even for a moment, think anything else," he whispered in her ear, placing his hands on her shoulders, his fingers on her collarbones. Touching that part of her body made the contact less alien to him: there was nothing but skin and bones, no softness detected.  
  


" _Lift your mighty limbs,_

 _And give praise to the fire!..._ "  
  


"Such a control over nature... I would like to know how to do the same" said Nameless in response.

"Unfortunately for you, you're born as a human and not as a leshen".

"Is this the name of your species? 'Leshen'... Is there anyone else like you here in the Unknown?"

He had sought information from her and had found one, but had given her another in exchange about himself without thinking.

"And Nameless should be the one without any shrewdness?!"

Woodworm and damnation -because of all her mysteries, her contrasts, the blurred boundary between her sincere naivety and the mockery- of a soul that she had stolen from him at the beginning and that he had left in her hand.

"No," replied Beast, moving away.

"Ok".

"Let's go back to the mill".

As he had been on his way back, Nameless did not object at all, nor did she say anything.

At least at the beginning.

"Could it be possible that on other occasions I heard that song from afar?" he heard Nameless ask him at a certain point.

"Yes. But it is not something to be sung like a children's nursery rhyme, so don't ask me to do it again now, nor must you sing it without a reason as good as the one I have shown you today".

Nameless nodded without hesitation.

"All right".  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> About the whole ̶b̶e̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶d̶e̶a̶d̶ leshen thing: I think that OTGW creators took inspiration from the leshen in The Beast's creation process. Leshen/Leshy are creatures from Polish folklore, and "The Witcher" creators too used these creatures in the game(s). In this, I took some inspiration from both Wikipedia and The Witcher, but nothing will go too much in details in my fic 😌
> 
> ⭐Thank you for reading!⭐


	3. Subrisum

It was better.

 _He_ was feeling better.

Maybe because the time that flowed took him further and further away from the past terrible defeat, maybe because his Lantern was fed in a more regular way, he actually had recovered his energy and went back to be the "usual" Beast; always lazy, of course, tending to let the lost souls ruin themselves giving "only" some contribution and enjoying seeing them drown in their own stupidity, in their own loss of hope, but finally _himself_. And that was the most important thing.

In part it was also thanks to his Lantern Bearer who, in addition to always being stubbornly Nameless, was also without any intention of leaving the house in the forest. By now he had full confirmation of this, also due to the fact that she had started to help him in his work. 

Not in the part about the Dark Lantern as she already did, but in the part about making people lose their lives and indirectly leading them to death and becoming oil trees.

It wasn't something she started to do immediately after accepting full responsibility for the effects of her tea and chocolates - she still had a good supply of both - it happened later. 

In the period of time immediately following that thing, he had seen Nameless thoughtful in her everlasting dead calm, lying down on the single armchair next to the fireplace, giving him permission to enter the house when she heard him knocking but without ever giving him the attention he had become accustomed to receive from her.

She had ignored his comments to remind her of what she had done -to which she had answered "Hm-mh" and nothing else- she had not listened his anecdotes about the wayfarers encountered in the forest, nor his attempts to dig for other nuggets of information about her had been effective, not at all. 

All that had gone on for a while, making him go so far as to "accidentally" break two or three fragile objects he had found around him. Not for the lack of attention itself -as he was trying to convince himself- but for the lack of respect derived from it. A human being who had offered to make herself useful and to whom, for this reason, he did the courtesy of sparing her life and not trying to turn her into an Edelwood tree, had absolutely no right to behave like that.

He had heard from Nameless, who spoke quite unfiltered, that his attitude and the way he had broken things "by mistake" looked a bit like that of a cat, but the lack of attention -of respect!- had ended there, along with the "math" done by Nameless, whatever she had intended with this term.

It was from that moment on that she had begun to participate actively, albeit indirectly, in his work, giving him the impression of looking at a blooming flower. Her calmness hadn't gone away but what he had seen the day the chariot sank into the swamp was more and more often seen in Nameless, who was more expressive, less pale, more "reactive", more alive.

Well, maybe she wouldn't have remained alive for long if she continued to pick poisonous herbs around the forest instead of aromatic ones to try to flavor certain things she did with her chocolates, but Beast had tried to avoid this giving to Nameless a quick course of the "no herbs". He took some and then showed them to her, "This one no, this one no, no, also this one is a no and NO". That seemed to be effettive.

The Woodsman had come back to Beast's mind, again: not because of the resemblance, but because of the lack of it. Desperate that the Woodsman might have felt, he had never thought of asking him more about the oil and helping him as Nameless was doing; in fact the deal between them had worked until the Woodsman had been unaware of the origin of the Edelwood trees, something that Nameless knew from the beginning. 

Another thing that never happened with the Woodsman was that he had never given him permission to enter his house, but it was also true that he, Beast, was never interested in doing so, the contrary to what was happening with Nameless. 

Drowning in remote memories, even older than his own arrival in the Unknown, he was able to remember the tendency of some other leshen, younger, "hungry" and way more foolish than him, to kidnap women. He had never done so in the past, and could still say he did not have, because it was Nameless who approached him first, and in any case it was difficult for him to feel attraction for something so soft. "Thin nor fat, has curves at most", she described herself as this and was accurate, but every part of her human body was soft compared to what he was made of.

And anyway, Nameless was the Lantern Bearer: nothing more.

It was night and Beast had almost reached the mill when he saw three men standing in front of the entrance of Nameless' house, and she stood on the threshold. He could not understand their exact words but he seemed to hear them asking for shelter for the night with a little too much insistence.

He didn't like it one bit.

"She's Nameless but she's not helpless. She has an axe," he thought.

The work of loading, unloading and cutting the wood had given her more strength in her arms and more manual skills in using that tool, but she was always one and there were three of them.

When she agreed to let them in and one of them elbowed one another with a smirk, Beast started to like it even less. 

"Fine, she's not helpless, but she's definitely brainless!"

If something had happened to her, the risk of his Lantern ending in the wrong hands would have been more than plausible in that situation, which was not tolerable. It was fine giving the wrong directions as she had started to do in order to help him, but not in the middle of the night, not with three insistent human males, nor was it smart to let them into the house.

If he had to break his policy of pure laziness and general little or no intervention to save her -saving the Lantern. Not her. Ok, saving her too, but secondly - he would certainly have made her pay for it somehow, because Nameless' task was to make his existence simpler, not to complicate it further with such a display of naivety, as if the rest, with her attitude and mysteries, had not been enough.

He approached the house and looked out the window that gave a wider view of the living room.

Nameless seemed to have convinced them to drink something warm, but they made a mistake to agree, considering that now they were lying on the floor, their bodies still warm but certainly dead. His quick course about the "no herbs" came in hand, but not just in the way he thought.

Beast didn't hear her voice, but saw his Lantern Bearer sighing a "Damn" and lifting her gaze over the window, outward, on him.

"Will you help me carry them out? A couple of these are heavy and, with all the love in the world for the Edelwoods, if they grew up here they would break through the bathroom floor," she said, "Besides… Whatever… whatever" she added, talking more to herself than to him.

A lazy policy of non intervention -or a little less than that- the one of Beast could have been described as such; the opposite could have been said in describing that of Nameless, who by now had lost every restrain and smiled at that, then smiled at him, with a rosy color on those cheeks that were always too soft.

That smile. 

That damned smile.  
  
  
  
  


🌛•🌝•🌜  
  
  
  


  
Yes, it's the meme 🤣

⭐Thank you for reading!⭐  
  



	4. Plus Ultra (Aequilibrium)

Full of enthusiasm, his multicolored eyes brighter than ever, Beast touched ecstatically a tall, big, strong Edelwood tree trunk. 

His trees had always been rather large and perfectly healthy, but never so incredibly powerful, thick, oozing oil.

If before he had been back to feel ok, as usual, now he was feeling something different, something _more_ : more vigorous, more energetic, more powerful, more everything. 

He also had the impression that he had become taller and that his horns had become thicker, but he wasn't sure one hundred percent of this; what he knew for certain was that, beyond the contribution of Nameless, his Lantern had never been so brilliant, and the flow of lost souls that before had become a burden to manage had returned to be what he should have considered originally: a godsend from heaven. He felt as fit as he had ever felt since… well, ever, to the point of being rather convinced that he could now bring darkness down at will throughout his territory, not just in individual parts of the forest near him.

Such control over darkness was his gift, each leshen had one entirely his own, beyond the characteristics common to all; although, as far as he could remember, the others could also hide in a "layer" of darkness as he did, none of them had ever been able to spread it in the surrounding environment, none, he alone. 

He continued to be lazy and to follow a policy of very low interference because that was his nature, but where it was necessary to be more active, then Nameless intervened. 

Beast had lost count of how many lost souls had become Edelwoods thanks to their conjoined activity, carried out perfectly without going against each other. While he relied on magic and his own mind games, Nameless exploited the trust that her very common aspect generated in others to give wrong directions or serve the vagrants the last hot and poisoned drink of their tragic existence. In this, Beast had noticed the tendency of Nameless to give the younger people the first treatment - and then to pass them on to him, in some cases - and the second to anyone whose age was equal or superior to hers.

Whatever Nameless' age was, of course, because it was still unknown to Beast despite the time spent together with her had increased and continued to increase every day when he decided to have spent enough time in the forest and reach the mill -which at that point had become almost a second burrow.   
He had his own in the depths of the forest, invisible and inviolable to every creature other than a leshen, and... yes, perhaps it would have been time to go back there: he would not have said that he was beginning to forget how it was like, but almost, so he intended to remedy.

But only after he had been a while at the mill, reaching his Lantern Bearer, thief, serial killer, chocolate lover with a tendency to stumble around -although she was getting better through and through. In recognizing the herbs, on the other hand, she did not: then for safety, if she used them for herself, she never used new ones- the only stable company in his days, listener and almost... colleague.

The last one might have sounded like a big word, thought by him _it_ _was_ , and this almost stopped him from knocking at the mill's door.

Maybe it was the case to stop, or at least to slow down. She could have been Nameless as always and without any intention of giving him clear information that would have given peace to certain mental woodworms of his once and for all, but Beast was not sure that it was safe to go on like this. He had already gone too far with the consideration and the attention he was giving to someone who was just a useful human being and nothing more, _nothing more_.

Or so he thought.

But it was Nameless who had his Lantern. She was the one who made it all work.

In the past, he may have believed he was at his best, but in fact, he had never been so powerful and strong as he was at that moment, he had never really been before Nameless' arrival in his life.

He had let her keep his soul without tricking her to believe that someone else's dear to her was in the Dark Lantern, and a comment of hers in their conversations about how keeping that flame lit was vital for him - "A choice of terms that wasn't random, was it? Damned and blessed woman!" - hinted that she might have guessed what she had in her hand, and the result was... what it was. Perhaps Beast was right in thinking he had gone too far, but the "too far" was also such that he could not go back, even if he wanted to... and whether he really wanted to or not was a question to which he was too lazy to answer.

He knocked on the front door of the mill.

"Come in".

The voice came further than usual, in fact, Beast did not see Nameless in the living room.

"Upstaaairs!..."

The noise of water stirred, the scent of soap. While standing still at the bottom of the short staircase that would lead him upstairs, Beast thought that this was a day full of hesitations. 

He became animated and, step by step, climbed up.

The scene he found in front of him was similar to what he had imagined. Nameless, with her wet hair and her expression more than ever dead calm on her face slightly reddened by the heat, was lying in the bathtub - mostly full of foam - the back resting against one end, one arm bent behind her head, and the legs at the other end of the tub. 

In terms of size, two Nameless could have been comfortable together immersed in the water: the Woodsman, the person to whom the bathtub was due, was not a man of small size.

To complete the picture there were towels placed on a small table and a box of chocolates which Nameless had already half emptied.

"You're early. Usually, you pass by when I'm finished," said that soft blessing and curse with female features.

Beast lingered briefly on the threshold. "Is that really not a problem for you?"

Nameless shook her head. "Absolutely. Is it for you?"

"No".

"Perfect. How about coming in the water?..." asked him Nameless, who, besides being without shrewdness and without brakes, must have concluded that she could also be without inhibitions.

There was one word that lately he had heard her say several times: "Whatever".

Whatever.  
What was done, was done.

Beast took off his falsely worn cloak and, "whatever", he entered the bathtub cautiously. He held back a sigh of relief while he immersed himself in the hot water, sitting and half-lying down in the opposite direction to that of his Lantern Bearer. He didn't like fire, It was dangerous to him and, in fact, the Lantern was the only flame he accepted to be very close to, but he liked the heat, and the sensation he was feeling at that moment was regenerating.

If he hadn't said "whatever", the fact that the contact with the candid Nameless' limbs immersed in water and foam did not disturb him could also have alarmed him.

"You needed it, hmm? Believe it or not, coming from outside you managed to cool the entire bathroom".

"You could not have let me in, or let me stay downstairs," replied Beast, leaning against the bathtub in the same way she was.

"And find some other broken things? No, thank you, it's me the one who has to pick up the pieces" replied the woman, blowing bubbles in the direction of his face.

Bubbles that he, with the reflexes of a cat and a similar instinct, quickly burst before they reached their destination. "I did it by mistake. Is it allowed only to you to be careless every now and then?"

"By mistake, sure," she smiled, raising an eyebrow and blowing more foam at him.

"Can you stop, please?" puffed Beast, getting rid of the bubbles again while the Nameless wretch laughed, "Always playing, Nameless".

"Oh, yes".

"But you can't do it all the time. You are aware of that, aren't you? What we are doing in this forest is not a game," said Beast. "What is happening here and now isn't".

Nameless took the chocolate. "If you say so".

"We've gone far enough to share this, you wanted it. It should mean that from your point of view there is a certain..." intimacy, that was the right word, but even in that situation, he didn't feel like using it. If it had been unilateral on Nameless behalf it would have been different, but it wasn't unilateral at all "... Tranquility in getting naked".

"More naked than that, there is only flayed". 

The irritation led Beast to contract the fists hidden by the foam. "You know what I mean and what I want, don't pretend it isn't so".

"Beyond the fact that the leshen, at least the one in front of me, resemble cats in certain aspects you can't say I know much about the person I'm sharing the tub with. But I have already been reprimanded for being careless," she replied by shrugs.

"You know who I am, what I am, what I do, you know that you have my soul in your hands every day: what else do you want from someone who doesn't even know your name?!"

"Oh. Then you know that I know. Souls for a soul, an almost alchemic exchange, even if all of the alchemy that I have in mind is the one in a certain anime. And you don't know what anime are, nor what a television is," she sighed, throwing a chocolate up into the air and catching it with her mouth, "Isn't that funny? Even things like these, all of them from 'Elsewhere' as you call it, I don't miss them. I don't miss anything except certain sweets, but I can get used to it...I don't need to eat anyway".

Initially Beast would have wanted to reply again, but he avoided doing so: he felt closer to certain answers than he had ever been. "You had noticed it a long time ago, isn't it?"

"Shortly after my arrival here. I needed to eat only when I remembered that in theory I was supposed to do so in order to survive, I needed to go to the bathroom only when I wondered how long it had been since I had seen a toilet. I also realized that the same goes for all the lost souls here, but not everyone noticed that this one is not what we knew as 'life', just something that can resemble it. I did my math, Beast, I told you so" continued Nameless, looking at the ceiling "especially after the first wrong directions I gave".

"And what is the result of your math, Nameless?"

"That giving little importance to the lives of the people here can be something doable, bearable, because those are not "lives" in the sense in which I have always conceived them, so I can follow certain desires without consequences. I can have tea, chocolate, whatever I can get. All this can be a dream, and if it is, why should I care? Or it can be the afterlife, and if so, if it really is the afterlife or a part of it, then I don't have to worry anyway: I have already been judged".

He saw her take another chocolate. She hadn't finished it yet but it was fine, even better when, after saying "Open wide!", she threw one of those milk delicacies into his mouth.

" _Anno_ _Domini_ 2020, this is how you can call my 'Elsewhere'. Finding a place in the world is tiring already, staying there even worse, then everything falls down. Work, friendships, family, self-perception in regards to society, future: everything is gone. Trying to solve all this mess is not enough, thinking about people who care about your well being is not enough. Going in the woods near home late at night in the middle of the winter, wearing a nightgown way too thin, doesn't seem a bad idea. You walk, you think you're about to fall asleep, and then a young lady and her strange black-toothed aunt find you and want to take you to a warmer place. What happens after that is all so strange, bizarre, and absurd that convinces you to keep your warmest clothes on when needed, and finally..."

"Here we are," said Beast.

"Here we are" repeated Nameless "If I had been judged by some kind of God and the result is this, sharing the bathtub with someone who is considered pure evil while eating chocolates, it's perfectly fine by me. Perhaps life was not suitable for me, or I was not suitable for life and living, but this, my situation as it is now, it's fine".

"Maybe it was destiny. You couldn't find a place Elsewhere because you were destined to find It here in the Unknown" Beast said, rather convinced of his own words.

"So that you, now that you say there are more lost souls -and it would be strange the other way around- would become more powerful than the older trees suggest you had ever been. Lost souls arrive, some find their place, some leave, taking care of the rest of them, the ones overcrowding, is up to you... or us. Now now if that’s not balance!..."

"Balance". Beast would have lied if he said he had ever considered his actions from that point of view: he was feeding the Dark Lantern to survive and he found satisfaction in doing so, he was actually evil, to define him otherwise would have been a lie. He had never thought anything else, about having a greater "mission".

And, as always, he was too lazy to think about it even at that moment.

"Well, I guess we'll start meeting a little less often from now on," Nameless said, stretching "I partially gave you what you wanted and for which you came here, information, despite remaining Nameless; maybe it's not something that useful to you, but that's it. Since we are in the mood to talk, is there something about leshen you want to share?"

"A remote memory that I recalled some time ago. Perhaps because of the shortage of leshen women, who yes, existed, it happened that several of us, mostly young, developed a certain interest in human females. In some cases, they came to kidnap them".

"Is this a memory of youth, Beast?

Dead calm.

As always.

"No. I never did something like that. I'm not attracted to human women, Nameless," he replied, caressing her leg from ankle to knee "Not even a little".

"Uh-uh. Sure, that's crystal clear. Well, the water is getting cooler, I'd say it's time for me to go out," said Nameless, now also shameless, shrugging "Whatever!..."

The lazy sensations while seeing her coming out of the bathtub -first of all a certain fun- were swept away in one fast swoop when Beast noticed a detail on Nameless' body that led him to open his eyes wide and reach out his hand to touch a part of her body that was neither her back nor her side nor her buttocks but was a bit between all three.

"Changed your mind about kidnapping, Beast?"

"No, and in any case it would be difficult to kidnap someone who is already with me. You had a... leaf. A small one. My fault, I presume".

It took imagination to define "small leaf" what was without any doubt a very stylized face, too similar to those that showed his leshen body, but that lie had been the first thing that had risen to his lips and Nameless seemed to believe it, or believe that he had tried to conceal some other kind of intentions, because she began to wrap the towel around her body after a brief laugh.

"If you stay longer, take off the other 'small leaves' when you go out," said Nameless, not without a certain irony, leaving him alone with lukewarm water, a stream of thoughts that she did not intuit, and the Lantern.

He grabbed that as soon as Nameless had gone far enough. 

Beast thought again: it had never shone like that, it was as if his "soul flame" was no longer alone, the light it emitted was twice the usual, or once and a half.

"Once and a half, indeed," muttered Beast, looking at the obvious.

Once and a half...or a soul and a half, of which the "half" was that of a Nameless woman.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anno Domini: The terms anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC) are used to label or number years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The term anno Domini is Medieval Latin and means "in the year of the Lord" but is often presented using "our Lord" instead of "the Lord",taken from the full original phrase "anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi", which translates to "in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ". (Wikipedia)
> 
> Is it due to possibile Nameless' classical studies? Or not? Who knows 🤷🏼
> 
> ⭐Thank you to whoever reads and likes my story⭐


	5. Iudicium

Days, nights, an indefinite and confused period of time -as always was in the Unknown- passed.

The Lantern became more luminous as the days passed by, a clear sign that, from hosting one and a half souls, it was getting closer and closer to host two.

Nameless had noticed the increased intensity of the glow but considered it the result of Beast's better physical conditions and/or her work with oil combined with her "help" with the vagrants. That assumption was partially right but she was unaware of the other implications.

She was always delicately poised between being quite cleaver and tremendously naive, between the knowledge of some mechanics of the Unknown and others she was blissfully ignorant of.

However, that time she could not be blamed on anything. Beast himself would not have been able to imagine such consequences before seeing them with his own eyes: being able to witness the progressive transformation of a lost soul into a female leshen was something completely unprecedented. As far as he could remember, in other places and other times leshen were _born_ , there was no way to _become_ one.

Other places and other times, precisely, that were not the Unknown, which with its incredible dynamics was keeping faith with its own name, surprising even someone who had been there for an eternity -almost in a literal sense.

This time it was Beast who felt compelled "to do some math", as Nameless did in the past, and try to understand causes and effects. Digging in reminescences that were much more than incredibly remote, he had remembered the story of a young leshen who had tied his soul to that of a human woman in a bizarre attempt to rise his chances to survive the monster hunter who was roaming around the area - with the only result of getting himself and the woman in question killed, of course - but he was _very_ sure he hadn't done anything similar with Nameless and he was also very sure that such spells couldn't be casted my mistake.

"I left her my Lantern".

"I left it to the Woodsman, too, but when did the Woodsman ever start changing into a leshen?! Years and years of grinding up lost souls without knowing it, and never has such a thing happened to him, never!"

" _Without knowing it._ Perhaps that's the key: Nameless knew it from the start, she said she heard the song in the tavern, they warned her, she believed their words but didn't care, she had no problem with it. She was fine with it, so fine that she wanted to do the same by following a desire _of her own_ , by following her nature, before and after doing her 'math'."

"She didn't care and everything that could happen to her had already happened, she thought. She was sure that there would be no consequences... _We_ were so".

"Why her? Why now?"

"... people 'Elsewhere' were - _and are_ \- passing through an interesting time, as I imagined. More lost souls were arriving, so many that I couldn't handle them, I was too weak, then Nameless arrived and the balance was restored. Maybe she was right that evening? That what I was doing, and I am still doing, has more effects and importance than I ever thought and, since I could not go on worthily by myself, another Beast in the making was put in my way, not destined to take my place but _to share it_ , to share the Dark Lantern?"

"A single Lantern, two leshen to protect it, no competition. It runs as smoothly as Edelwood's oil... or rather, it could run smoothly... besides always being Nameless, she's also pretty unpredictable".

Contrary to what she had assumed in the evening when they had shared hot soapy water, chocolate and information for the first time, his visits to the mill had not thinned out. On the contrary, his intentions to return to his lair as soon as possible had completely gone.

Leaving Nameless alone at various times during the day was inevitable but he had tried to increase the time to spend with her as much as he could, all in function of keeping an eye on her.

For a while she had made the task very easy for him, there had been other baths taken together and therefore other occasions in which he had checked the gradual spreading of the "leshen marks" along her back; unfortunately, after a while Nameless had suddenly stopped conceding him -such a hateful word!... - that intrusion into her privacy, just as she had started: "In the bathroom there is already a wooden coat rack, I don't need another one", she had said.

The delicate broken objects fallen more or less by accident had not managed to pur some sense into that cursed and blessed and _whimsical_ woman, so Beast could only assume that the marks continued to spread progressively... with greater speed when Nameless killed people directly, as he had seen. It made sense, it also collided with his theory of the whys and wherefores of her transformation.

He should have talked to her about it, he knew it, maybe it would have been smarter to tell the truth right away, but he had not been able to understand how to deal with a subject about he himself felt so surprised and confused, so he remained silent, gaining time.

"But sooner or later she will realize," he thought, "And then..."

Fireplace lit, that was ok.

Windows closed by wooden planks. That was bad.

Lantern left outside the front door. That was _very_ bad.

Beast had the vague feeling that "sooner or later" had become a "there and then", and that Nameless' reaction was not good.

"Nameless!" he exclaimed, certain that she could hear him from inside the house, "We need to talk!

No answer.

"There's more than one reason why you shouldn't have left the Lantern out here," he insisted, knocking against the door that didn't flicker as usual: something big had been put behind it to prevent him from passing, it was obvious "Let me in".

"So that's how you became stronger. My decision to help you in everything made possible for you to feed of my soul in a different way than usual. We had a deal, you used me, I gladly allowed that and now that I'm no longer needed, well, that's it. _Wonderful_. Your Lantern is ok, by the way" he heard her say from the other side of the door "Because the funny part in this whole thing is that I can't even be mad at you, not really. You behaved according to your nature, be mad at you would be like picking on a cat because it meows".

He couldn't blame her for speaking about his malevolent nature, and yes, feeding on a soul after a deception was one of the things he would quietly do and that actually did every single day; and yet, her words managed to irritate him.

"I left your Lantern outside a little while ago so that you could take it back" Nameless added "Keep feeding it yourself, come here and use the oil machine if you want, but the door of this house will stay closed. We'll see each other again when I'll be completely turned into an Edelwood tree. Grind me gracefully, that's all I ask".

Actually, to say Beast was feeling just irritated would have been an understatement.

He had spared her at the beginning, he had given a usefulness to her existence, he had supported Nameless in understanding and accepting her real nature, he had indulged her wanting to remain Nameless and certain whims even if he absolutely didn't have to, he had questioned himself about their kind of relationship and had courageously gone beyond his doubts and hesitations saying "Whatever" -a word that could have become their motto- and that was her way to thank him? A judgment without appeal, cutting ties like that, as easily as drinking a glass of water?!

Then he reflected. The irritation and everything else wore off in the blink of an eye when he realized the obvious: if the leshen marks had appeared in a place where Nameless could see them and so she realized she had others, surely she must have been feeling scared and confused. Surely she was scared even at the moment, because those marks looked a lot like the Edelwood trees "faces", he had to admit it.

So, how could he blame her? When he saw the first mark on her, he himself felt astonished and confused, and the body was not even his own.

"Be rational, Nameless! If I've wanted to consume your soul as you're accusing me to, do you really think I would have kept to leave my Lantern in your hands so easily? It wouldn't have made sense. You would've noticed, it wouldn't have been and immediate process and I know perfectly that you're not a merciful person: don't tell me that if you had been fully convinced of your accusations you would not have shutted off the Lantern and killed me right away trying to stop the process, because I won't believe you".

Again, only silence came from Nameless, but maybe it was for the better. At least she was listening to him and was not continuing to accuse him with the flat voice tone she used when they first met.

"I imagine what may be going on, but I can assure you that I had nothing to do with it" continued Beast.

"I have Edelwood's 'faces' on my abdomen, one on my chest, one where you touched me and others on my back" listed Nameless in a totally inexpressive voice "And now you're saying that you 'imagine what may be going on but you have nothing to do with it'. Interesting".

"As much as they may resemble Edelwood's 'faces', they're not. Actually, the ones that have formed on your body are something that we, for convenience, could call "leshen marks". Hearing that, you can guess that your - _our_ \- situation could be more complex than you think and that you will not become oil for the Lantern, and also about the Lantern I'd have something to say. You're scared, you're confused, I know, I understand," he added, partly to induce her to open the door and partly because he really understood her. "On certain points of the matter I'm a bit confused too. Let me in, Nameless".

He had control over nature, so he could break the door down as he did to make easier her task of chopping the wood to light the fire, but he didn't, exactly as he had never done before.

Perhaps, more than pretending to respect the spaces he had given her, he pretended _-with himself-_ to pretend.

He heard the sound of a heavy piece of furniture moving, then a sigh.

"Come in".


	6. Tenebris

Six leshen marks of different size on her abdomen and one bigger mark on her candid and exposed chest, exactly as Nameless had told him. 

Noticing this, Beast saw nothing else: he approached her, staring at the marks with something that could have been described as greed, which ended up only increasing when he thought that those marks were on her- Lantern Bearer, capricious woman, thief, killer, blessing and curse of his existence, still soft but not for long and now lesovikha in the making.

His hands reached the marks, touched them, caressed them as much as the others on Nameless' back... and then, without warning and, as usual, without any respect, she grabbed the jug full of cold water that was on the table and poured it over his head.

"W-ha!... Why?! I was just looking!" he protested.

"Do leshen's fingers have eyes?" answered Nameless looking at him expressionless "You've acted as a wooden coat hanger so far, continue to do so even while you explain what's going on".

Beast was aware that she wasn't wrong, but he was still forced to nip in the bud the temptation to "accidentally" drop the now empty jug. 

"Such an attitude does not encourage much conversation, you know... where are you going now?"

"To get more water, I'm not sure that one cold shower has been enough".

Beast blocked her by holding her wrist firmly, but also delicately enough to avoid hurting her in any way. After a brief moment of immobility, Nameless agreed to let herself be guided to the fireplace, from which Beast still kept a proper distance.

"Lost souls don't suffer hunger and other things, but they suffer cold. You should know this, considering that more than one of them has become an Edelwood tree due to frost, hypothermia and the wrong directions you gave. In the future everything will be different for you, but here and now, Nameless, be careful".

She raised an eyebrow, then made a short sigh. "What is happening? How and why do I have leshen marks on my body, completely at random and out of the blue?"

"It's not exactly 'out of the blue', Nameless" admitted Beast, with a certain caution in his voice, "let alone completely random".

"How long has it been going on?...no, don't answer. I already know that. At the very least, it has been since the evening of the 'little leaf', correct me if I'm wrong".

"That's the moment when I became aware of the presence of the first mark, I admit it," he confessed. "But as far as I know it could have been there even from before. I'm not responsible for that, so you can imagine my astonishment that evening".

"Not enough to induce you to tell me about this small detail," said Nameless, "which is not that small anymore," she added, noticing cavities begin to appear progressively on her arms.

"You're becoming more and more of a lesovikha," murmured Beast, without being able to look away from the marks which, due to the shadows casted by the fire, seemed even deeper. "If I didn't tell you about it before, it was because I had 'to do some math', not understanding what was happening first. This speech should sound familiar to you".

"And what is the result of your math, Beast?" she asked with the exact words with which he had asked her that question some, or long?, time ago.

"The result is that your speech about balance could be correct, Nameless. Do you remember that? You said: there are more lost souls because of the events that occurred, and are occurring, in 'anno Domini 2020'. You talked about my weakness, and you were right about it," he admitted "And about my inability to handle the vagrants flow. That was the situation, then you came along. You knew who I am, what I am, what I do, you accepted it, you started doing it yourself, you understood what my Lantern cointains… Lantern that is now 'ours', not just mine anymore".

"Ours… wait" a surprised expression appeared on Nameless' face "Don't tell me that if it shines so brightly it's because...".

"It is not something for which I am responsible" Beast repeated "But yes, Nameless. Your soul shines with mine in our Dark Lantern. You have behaved like a Beast on all counts, and Beast on all counts you're becoming".

The restless souls of Edelwood, just as they always did when he sang his song, started a choral chant, quiet, at least for the moment, but audible throughout the forest. 

Beast was able to distinguish words in leshen’s ancient language, unpronounceable by human organs and not easy to understand for himself after an eternity spent speaking and hearing the common language of the Unknown.

Something was happening and he had no idea what it was, but the strangest thing was that he did not feel alarmed, quite the opposite: what animated his wooden-like body was nothing but euphoria, expectation.

"I understand. That's why you are more powerful and, despite of this and what's happening, I don't feel bad," Nameless said. "The last one thing I said is also the reason why I didn't kill you right away, I admit it" she said.

The choir was increasing in volume and intensity, even Nameless must surely have been hearing that song but didn't seem to care. 

The surprised expression on her face had disappeared, as had the inexpressiveness, in favor of a very decisive air. The rosy color on her cheeks had returned, she seemed to have begun to feel the same expectation that he felt, and her eyes shone... perhaps not only metaphorically: Beast was quite sure that he was seeing a glow similar to that omnipresent in his gaze, a glow that until recently was not there.

"Lantern Bearer, woodworm in my thoughts, female blessing and curse...colleague. Lesovikha" he murmured. He felt that if he hadn't touched her he would have exploded, so he holded her hand. "I firmly believe that you're not feeling bad because your physical appearance is just adapting to that of your soul, Nameless".

The leshen marks suddenly spread over the Nameless' body. She gave him a look that now had the multicolored shades of his own.

"And I do believe you're right".

The chorus of Edelwood became very loud, the sound of a thunder that seemed more like the opening of a gash in the sky made the earth tremble; then the light died, first of all the one of the fireplace, as if sucked by the absolute darkness suddenly dropped inside and outside the house. 

If Beast had not held Nameless' hand -that swollen and then shrunk and hardened into a leshovikha hand while it was held in his- he would have been thrown back by the power of that magical event unprecedented in his very long existence, while the powerful singing of the restless souls began to take on the form and the rhythm of an archaic dance.

The earth stopped shaking, Beast could see his colleague perfectly even in the darkness. 

She was neither tall nor short, as she had always been, in the same way she was neither thin nor fat, but without that alien softness; now she was a lesovikha, she had horns -smaller than his- and thin tendrils loose in the wind like her hair had been before her transformation. She was cloaked in the same darkness that he was, without that human shell that was nothing more than a disguise that holded her back, without any more physical differences to divide her from him, without that crumb of soul that now shone entirely in the Lantern together with his, and above all, always Nameless.

Perhaps it would have been time to insist and ask her what her name was, despite the possibilities to receive an answer such as "It didn't matter before, even less now that I am no longer human".

He approached her, she let herself be held and, guided by instinct, they began to follow the notes sung by the spirits who were announcing to the whole Unknown the birth of The Second Beast.

The light came back gradually, shortly or much later - time was always a strange thing in the Unknown - and Beast was still clutching what was now the other leshen. He slightly bowed to reach her lips with his, and...

"A coat hanger?!" he exclaimed, a bit shocked at the idea that he had almost kissed a piece of furniture "Nameless!"

He heard rumors outside the house, a masculine voice screaming accusations about a lost daughter; then he heard Nameless quietly confirming that she had made his daughter end up lost in the woods the day before, "And who knows where she is now". 

Nothing but a lie, he had found earlier the little girl in question, who had become a victim of the cold and, later, an Edelwood tree. 

Nameless' approach with the man was decent, in his opinion: looking for a daughter impossible to save would have thrown the man into the purest despair with consequent surrender.

"At least she has learned well," eyerolled Beast.

True, he hadn't thought about one thing: the strategies that Nameless had used until then - deceiving the victims thanks to an absolutely common appearance - could no longer work, not with her new lesovikha features, but he didn't doubt that they would find a new one or more. They would have had all the time in the world.

The male voice became louder, Beast heard Nameless' crystal laughs in response but, a short time before Beast appeared on the threshold, he saw something that he did not like at all: the shadow projected by a moving light, such as that of a common oil lantern, undoubtedly launched against the new lesovikha.

He came out so hastily that he barely noticed the sound of broken glass and the angry cry of pain of his colleague, who had been hit hard and covered with burning oil.

"Nameless!" exclaimed Beast, unable to accept that everything had precipitated so suddenly. "The river, go into the-"

"Maybe you think you can kill me, but do you know what this move was like?!" she said -indifferent to the pain she was surely feeling and with a distorted voice- to the man who had attacked her, grabbing the axe stuck in a stump near there "Muda muda muda! WRYYYYYYY!"

She shouted the last word and threw the axe in the direction of the man. The axe went to stick in his skull with a deaf noise.

Stunned, not necessarily in the good sense of therm, Beast remained motionless both in front of that scene and that which took place after, seeing Nameless -who had also become reckless in a brief delirium of omnipotence due to her new form- going to dive into the river while shouting "It buuuuurns! Burns burns burns BUUURNS!".

It had all been very fast.

Too fast.

"Fresh water, fresh water, oh my Dio Brando yes!" said Nameless after a long sigh of relief "Oooh, damn it".

He saw her look up at him.

"We've been together for a long time. When have you ever seen me act in such a crazy way facing such a danger?" Beast harshly scolded her "And I have not become leshen today! You are not yet able to use magic, and of course it could not be otherwise, nor do you know the nature of your personal 'gift', so try to cool off, Brainless!...thinking that you started out all right..."

"You complained about the cold shower earlier, now I'm taking a cold bath, we're even… geez, I thought it might hurt, but since my soul is divided by my body I didn't think that the pain would have been so much," mumbled the lesovikha, sitting in the icy water.

Beast passed his hand over his face. "How is it possible that sometimes you can be so smart and at the same time so nonsense?! I don't get It, really".

A blessing and a curse with female features, the definition was more valid than ever, even now that she was a lesovikha: he would have to explain many things to her to avoid her behaving so carelessly again, even though he was sure that the lesson about staying away from the fire had been learned.

"You and I are going to have a long talk. And I'm not going to give you the chance to walk away suddenly by putting a coat hanger in my hand," he warned her.

"I heard someone coming, I couldn't do anything but go," she replied, "This will be my first Edelwood as The Second Beast, you know…".

"I understand your enthusiasm but you have to slow down, Nameless, really. We'll have all the eternity to-"

The wind brought a deep and familiar voice to his ears.

" _We should meet soon, Beast_..."

The echo of the last word was lost among the trees. 

That of Enoch had been a short but efficient message, and after what happened before was not even unexpected to Beast.

"What was that?" asked Nameless, who could have still been without a name but not without curiosity.

"I believe..." Beast replied, "that the people from Pottsfield may have noticed something".

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well yeah, here we have a JoJo reference 🤫 "Oh my Dio Brando" instead of "Oh my God". Fun fact: in italian the word "Dio" means "God" 🤣 so...
> 
> Thank you to whoever appreciates my work. Next chapter will be the last one 


	7. Versipellis

"I had heard many rumors about you, Beast. The very first ones gave you up for dead..."

"People interpret certain facts according to their wishes, nothing more. Too bad for them that facts are far from reality”.

In an area that was neither Edelwood nor Pottsfield, but rather a free zone between the two, Beast was having a meeting for a long time postponed - since the defeat he had suffered long ago, to be precise - with Enoch, the undisputed lord of the charming town of flourishing pumpkins and dancing skeletons.

At first they had maintained a policy of non-interference in their respective territories, due to various factors including equal power and equal permanence in the Unknown, but as time passed the two "kings" ended up becoming... friends? Close acquaintances? They had never given a label to their relationship but, whatever was the nature of it, it was good enough to drink tea together - brought by Enoch - which was exactly what they were doing sitting at an iron table in the shade of a tree, with the Lantern placed at the feet of Beast who, for that time, had brought it with him.

"Then, other rumors gave you for tired, wounded, not dead, but very close to being it," continued Enoch, swaying slightly "and seeing that huge quantity of lost souls coming to Pottsfield after having crossed your territory unharmed, as long as those who arrived directly in my city, I thought it myself. And besides having delayed in arranging a meeting even this time, you didn't answer my past attempt of contact...".

"Recently I had my reasons, and previously I wouldn't have had much to say," replied Beast, sipping tea knowing that the more complicated part of the speech was coming.

"Then the music changed. Various inhabitants of the Unknown no longer left your territory, various lost souls passing through other areas, and then in the forest, had the same fate. Return to normal, so I thought. Then ‘various’ became ‘many’, ‘many’ became ‘almost all of them’ and finally Edelwood sang, darkness swallowed up every light and the whole Unknown fell into chaos: every common inhabitant and every wanderer panicked for more than a minute. You disturbed the Pottsfield harvest festival," Enoch informed him, in an even lower voice than usual as he leaned towards him, "Be aware of this”.

His "colleague" was taller but Beast did not make a turn. "Was it time again? You know very well that here the conception of time is particular, even more so for me in recent times. In any case, to realize it would not have changed anything, what happened wasn’t up to me. Not really" he added, and then made a brief sigh "Honestly, Enoch, I think I have a problem".

"Looking at you I would have said otherwise" replied the other, and Beast imagined that he was referring to the changes in his physique, which had become taller and more powerful, and to his thickened horns "Grant me poetic license to tell you that I am all ears".

"Well… let’s say that there’s a soft blessing and curse with feminine features that, since her becoming a leshen hybrid and then The Second Beast, has ceased to be soft but not the torture and delight of my days".

The initial reaction of the Lord of Pottsfield was a long perplexed silence. "What have you done?"

"A woman is involved..."

"This is the only thing I understood perfectly, but it doesn't make me any less astonished, rather the opposite. Again: what have you done?" asked Enoch again, "And marginally, what is the name of this torture and delight?"

"I wonder about that myself!"

Silence on Enoch's part, again. "One of us here is being mocked".

"Do you understand why I think I have a problem?"

"Explain, once and for all".

So did Beast, including every salient point in his story while categorically excluding "whatever": of his very personal doubts and hesitations, of his finding alien Nameless’ soft human body but being bothered by that less than he should have been, of the exasperated note in his search for information -or closeness?- on the evening of the first bath together with her, Enoch should not have known. There was no reason. Now she was a lesovikha.

Whatever, then.

"...and this is the reason behind what happened and which disturbed your party. I couldn't have stopped it even if I wanted to, because I didn’t ask for this," concluded Beast. "I could never have imagined that a Lantern Bearer, under these conditions, could become what she is now. Have you ever heard such stories, Enoch? I don't, and I have been in the Unknown as long as you did".

He saw Enoch shake his head. "Never. Seems that certain mechanics of the Unknown are still unknown even to us. Well, now you know the joys of collaboration as I do: in Pottsfield there is a strong sense of community that makes everything easier and more enjoyable. You and your lesovikha are also a tiny community, and it seems to work, although...".

"Though she’s without experience of magic and without shrewdness, as usual, and this is the problem I was talking about. She risked to burn shortly after her transformation! She wouldn't have died because her soul was safe in the Lantern but that doesn't save her from serious damage. She seems to have learned at least this lesson, but certain strategies have to be retouched, she has to master magic better and she still didn’t show her personal gift as a leshen".

"And certain names are still to be learned," added Enoch, with a hint of fun. "I still find it hard to believe it”.

"The only clue I had was when I tried to teach her how to make oil turtles" the delicate, dark animals he used to better guard his territory and possess the minds of animals, to be precise "We discovered that she can't create them, she creates little snakes that she said were connected to her name: that's all I could find out".

Nameless's comment about this had been that perhaps the fact that he created turtles was due to his innate laziness, but this was another detail that there was no need to tell Enoch, just as there was no need to tell that Beast had listed many names linked to snakes without his lesovikha ever giving him satisfaction. Stubborn as She was, she probably would have said that he was wrong even if he guessed right.

"You said that before she met you she wandered in these moors long enough. Could it be that she came to my area too, even though she didn't stop?" Enoch said thoughtfully.

Beast shook his head. "She only heard about your little town, but she was never there. Or so she said".

"More mysterious than ever. Well, it's time for me to go," said the Lord of Pottsfield standing in all his mighty stature. "Duty never stops calling. Bring her along next time.

"I will not miss it.

A brief goodbye and everyone went their own way back to their usual routine, which in Beast's case included going back into the forest even before he had time to take a look at what his lesovikha was doing.

"His"... was a big word, referring to a whimsical woman who had barely let herself be touched since she had changed and kept him out of the bathroom and bathtub. 

Not even tempting her with the idea of the hot springs in his den worked, she had continued to deny herself to him, a bit because she was very busy learning to live as a lesovikha -and to take the right measures when she went in and out of the rooms taking the horns into account. He had stopped counting the times that Nameless had bumped them around - which was understandable, and partly because she wanted to make him pay for having kept distance before, held back by the difference between the respective species. 

It was quite exasperating but, in his opinion, sooner or later -hopefully more sooner than later- she would give up and let herself, and him, do what they both wanted.

On the way to the mill he met some turtles and several snakes. He had to recognize it: she was good at making these. She still had some difficulties with the magic of nature, in fact the Edelwoods created by her were "More crooked than 2020 was" - as she said - but they were certainly very strong, and anyway in singing "Come Wayward Souls" she had a crystal clear voice that was a pleasure to listen to. Her voice had also improved in her transformation into lesovikha, not because of a matter of species but of self-confidence given by a nature that was now perfectly reflected in her appearance.

As much as his job was to destroy people to survive, it was nice to see a "construction" for once.

A cute thought and that was broken with extreme brutality seeing an unknown blond-haired human woman holding Nameless' the axe, which was dripping dark oil -which could be Eledwood or not, the color was the same- while standing still in front of something black torn to pieces and lying on the ground.

"Nameless?..."

He had spoken to Enoch about "serious damage" and seemed to have attracted it.

Without even thinking a little bit about anything, only wanting to avenge his wounded mate and calling himself idiot for having left her alone -absurdly, she was hurting herself now as the Second Beast, and not before as a human being!- he brought darkness down on the whole area, determined to abandon for once his politics of little and no intervention and to act, for once, against those who had dared to harm his lesovikha.

When he arrived behind the blonde culprit, however, she turned around and laughed... the laughter of a certain female blessing and curse that he knew very well.

"Are you serious?!" she exclaimed, rolling her eyes, now bright and multicolored, towards the sky, "You really fell for it, I can't believe it!

Mute, extremely confused and dangerously close to a completely understandable moment of hatred, Beast watched the woman's face and limbs shrink, blacken, and change into the lesovikha-like appearance of that capricious, wretched and Nameless woman, who at that moment he would almost have wanted to strangle without any hesitation.

"Guess who has finally discovered her gift as lesovikha?" announced the unfortunate "Versipellis! It seems that changing my skin is right in my nature, even thinking about the little snakes I create is absolutely perfect. Look!" she exclaimed, reaching the nearest Edelwood.

The next moment Nameless had become one of the last men she had killed when she was still human, then she returned to herself, then repeated the game, and went on like that several times.

"It only works with the Edelwoods derived from the souls that I took care of, but there are several of them. Now i can do something similar to what I did while I was human. Even a little while ago, I took the form of the blonde woman you saw and I was spotted by her fiance" told the wretched woman "I let myself be chased all the way to the frozen lake. Result: now there are two crooked Edelwoods in the middle!"

It was a good thing and Beast was happy both that the gift had manifested itself and that, for her, it was absolutely perfect; but unfortunately he was still so angry, due to the previous scare he had, that in response he turned his back to her and began to move away without saying a word.

To shout insults like a madman would have been closer to what was going through his mind, but it would have been a lack of style he did not want to incur, not because of that damn lesovikha of his.

"Wait, are you upset?!..." he heard her scream from afar.

"You moron!" thought Beast.

"Come on, it was a joke," he heard her say, now closer.

"And you are an idiot!" he insulted her mentally, without stopping.

"I didn't even think you could fall for it," she insisted. She had now reached him, and was at his side. "You have the Lantern with you: if anything had happened to me, the light would have been less bright. Among the things that you explained to me, there is also this...".

"Actually you are an idiot, but I am even worse worrying about you!" thought Beast.

He stopped only when he felt her hugging him from behind. It was the first real contact she had given him since she had transformed and, in general, the first time he saw her expressing regret in any way for something she had done or a wrong behavior she had adopted.

"Are you really that upset?..." he heard her whispering close to his ear, and he could hear a real note of contrition in her voice.

"What do you think?" he replied after a few seconds, tremendously conflicted about whether or not to detach himself; on the one hand he wouldn't have wanted to give in like that, on the other hand her hands gently caressing his chest were already managing to cloud his thoughts.

Cursed woman.

"I didn't think-"

"That's the problem, sometimes you think too little" Beast said harshly "And I have not yet heard the three magic words from you".

"Moon Prism Power, make up!...all right, all right" surrendered Nameless, seeing him trying to get away after that umpteenth mockery that he couldn't even understand. "We could say thaaat… well, perhaps I didn't take some things into account when I decided to do-"

"Three words. And after this you will take what you want to take at the mill and we will take it to our lair. At least, having you in my sight I will be able to avoid other scenes like that".

"It's the strangest proposal of cohabitation I have ever received".

"Three words, Nameless".

"Hm..."

He heard her whisper a word to him that wasn't the "I am sorry" he would have liked to hear, although an "S" was present at the beginning.

"What was it?" he asked her, turning to look at her.

Nameless shrugged.

"My name. What else?"   
  


* * *

Links to some of my drawings related to this story! 😌 the links don't work in notes, so...

[Encounters](https://www.deviantart.com/kobra91194/art/Encounters-863652171)

[Fine with it](https://www.deviantart.com/kobra91194/art/Fine-with-it-863749946)

[(don't) Say my name](https://www.deviantart.com/kobra91194/art/don-t-Say-my-name-863849274)

[Silly little things](https://www.deviantart.com/kobra91194/art/Silly-little-things-864127025)

[The Beasts are out there](https://www.deviantart.com/kobra91194/art/The-Beasts-are-out-there-864314993)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🌜•🌝•🌛
> 
> Versipellis: latin for italian "versipelle".  
> Versipelle: (ver-si-pèl-le) That changes skin, that mutates and pretends with skill, opportunist, deceptive.
> 
> Aaand this is the end.  
> I want to thank every one who appreciated this story ❤️  
> And I want to thank again itachiuchihaforever for the help with the translation 💐


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